Somehow "cheap weapons able to target civilians, but not those well protected" doesn't make me feel happier. And such weapon are clearly only useful for attack, not defense.

Well, arguing from the derivation of the word is just silly, but:
https://founders.archives.gov/...
clearly shows that some of them agreed with that point of view. Hamilton, however, was only one side. Others interpreted it differently.

Actually, all that literally means is that you can carry them. It doesn't say anything about ownership or control.

Calling that a deterrent is whitewashing it. A hypersonic missile is an attack weapon unless it is specifically an anti-missile missile. It's most highly useful in first strike situations.

Actually, it's one thing to announce, it's another to manufacture at scale. If this is real, it will be a severe threat in 5 years, perhaps a bit less.

What's the range? I really doubt that this is the new MAD, but it does add a new and exciting amount of uncertainty, and increase the advantage of attack over defense.

"Well regulated" is not well defined. It definitely didn't originally mean "government approved"...or at least it didn't mean that to everyone who put their signature to it.

You're being practical, not logical. Logically the 2nd amendment implies that the right to own arms should not be restricted. AFAIK, it's never been interpreted that way by the courts.

There are lots of other places where the clear logical meaning of the US Constitution is always ignored. Often for very sound reasons.

This happens also in LOTS of other parts of the legal system. If an AI ever starts interpreting and enforcing the laws in a literal fashion nearly everyone is going to be hurt. (Sometimes the laws were even written with the intent of selective enforcement, but often I believe people just didn't notice that they implied things that weren't intended.)

I hate all of this sales pressure BS - that the instant anyone hears your name you have to try to "convert" them to sales - and I literally run a webstore.

It's all so deeply anti-consumer, and I want no part in it.

Firstly, I see you have this notion that martian rocks must all be igneous.

You're not talking about rock, you're talking about regolith.

Depending on where the regolith is sourced

Regolith is not "sourced", it's blown across the whole planet. It's not simply "whatever the underlying strata is made out of".

But, since we are playing 'name the ignorance' in this exchange, your attestation stat perchlorate is 0.5% liberatable oxygen says 'Say i'm ignorant of basic chemistry without saying i'm ignorant of basic chemistry, and am bad at reading too.' The 0.5% statistic comes from the publication at bottom, and is the proportion of the regolith that is perchlorates.

I am the one who mentioned that regolith is 0.5% perchlorates, not that "perchlorates are 0.5% oxygen". *facepalm*

"Saying we'll get oxygen from the 0,5-1% of a poison in martian regolith, rather than bulk ice or CO2, is..."

For God's sake, learn to fucking read.

Washing the regolith to remove the perchlorate is a requirement for *any* other use of that regolith

Which is why you shouldn't be celebrating its existence. It is a problematic contaminant, not a resource.

As you have rightly pointed out, the water ice on mars is more 'frozen mud'. Cleaning the melt is going to be a necessary first step to using it *regardless*. That means either vacuum distillation, thermal distillation, or reverse osmosis filtration. Again, NOT OPTIONAL. This is necessary equipment that you need to bring, regardless.

And this just to get water, the most basic of offworld resources. And all of that equipment (especially the mining hardware itself) requires maintenance and spare parts, which impose more dependencies. And the TRL for use on Mars is low regardless.

You've gone from talking up the ease of operating on Mars to talking it down, yet your self-righteousness hasn't shifted at all in the process.

RO filtration is the least energy intensive of these.

Except, it isn't. 0,5-1% perchlorates. RO typically removes 90-95% of perchlorates. So you're down to ~500ppm. Human safety levels** are in the low parts per billion. You're five orders of magnitude off. Yes, you can purify water that far - and the more perchlorates, the easier - but you're talking an over millionfold reduction. It is not at all trivial. You're talking first RO to get it down to levels where it won't hinder bacterial growth, then bioreactor bacterial remediation, then filtration, then RO, then ion exchange. This is not some little, simple system.

** Plants can tolerate much more perchlorates than humans, but they also bioaccumulate perchlorates of exposed to them, so you have to reduce the water to low ppb levels.

The end products are clean water and perchlorate contaminated mud, and clean mud, with contaminated water.

Viola! *eyeroll*

And your "plan" for dealing with waste perchlorate doesn't just magically produce pure O2 and NaCl in the real world. First off, molten sodium perchlorate, which is what it becomes before it decomposes, is an extremely corrosive oxidizer. Exactly what are you planning to make the furnace out of, platinum? Secondly, you never get perfect decomposition. Apart from residual perchlorates, you have residual sodium chlorate, which is also corrosive, and is a literal herbicide. And your gas stream will contain contaminant chloride and chlorine dioxide, which, news flash, you don't want to breathe.

There is no way on Earth anyone would ever prefer this to just conducting electrolysis on the water that you've already purified.

What I want is a Yosarian mode.

When I switched off MSWindows, what I wanted was Windows 95b compatibility. It never showed up. It still hasn't. I've intentionally avoided later versions because of terms in the licensing.

These days the only things that haven't showed up on Linux, or had better replacements are a few music programs (more my wife's field than mine) and a few games...that I may have lost the CDs for.

It sounds as if MS is aiming to turn OpenAI into a wholly owned subsidiary. They're both so horrible that I'm not sure whether that would be good or bad.

It's worth noting that Nikola wasn't his first scam, either.

YOO-HOO